How to publish Notion pages with custom domains: Notion Sites 2024 overview
Websites are fundamental building blocks of the internet. They are publicly accessible interfaces with many possible purposes, such as selling goods and services or showcasing portfolios. Years ago, building a website was a significant project, requiring many programmers and consuming a lot of computing power (Perry et al., 1998). Over time, creating web pages has become much more accessible, available to virtually anyone with internet access, even without coding knowledge. This has been facilitated even more thanks to platforms like Squarespace, Webflow, and similar tools that allow website creation without code.
Besides websites, people also share documents on the web, especially with tools like Google Docs. Sharing documents is more nuanced than sharing full websites because documents often contain sensitive data that shouldn't be accessible to everyone. That's why documents can be shared with specific people via email or be access-restricted, similar to websites.
From a human "dark side" perspective, websites can be seen as a by-product of our desire to fulfill one of three "idols" (out of four), as Arthur Brooks puts it: money, power, or fame. You showcase your creations online to sell them and earn more money. You may display them publicly to increase your power and status, raising yourself in the human competence hierarchy. You might also showcase them to satisfy your desire for fame, increasing your recognition and respect, which can boost your social status.
Some years ago, in the 2010s, Notion came into play. At first, it was under the radar for many years. Then it loudly took the front seat in the world of personal productivity and team collaboration tools. This success is possibly due to a great mix of a well-made, aesthetically pleasing product, social media virality, and a highly effective community development strategy.
One of the pillar features in Notion are public templates. These are publicly-available Notion pages that can be duplicated by other users. The high popularity of Notion makes people feel happy to share public Notion pages because it allows them to associate themselves with the brand, which increases their social status.
Now Notion has introduced some updates regarding public pages and named the feature Notion Sites. Below is a breakdown of all the updates made to Notion Sites.
Pricing details
A few features of Notion Sites are only available to paid plans. Below is a detailed breakdown of Notion Sites pricing.
Free plan
Publish an unlimited number of Notion Sites
1 notion.site domain
Basic SEO (title and description cannot be customized)
Paid plans
Publish an unlimited number of Notion Sites
5 notion.site domains
Custom SEO (title and description can be customized)
Visual customizability (customizable share preview, favicon, top nav bar, black or white visual theme)
Google Analytics
Custom domains at $8/month (paid annually) or $10/month (paid monthly), per domain
Sites on a custom domain can remove Notion branding
How to use Notion sites
You can see and manage your Notion Sites from Settings & members (top left of the sidebar) > Sites. That is where you can manage your notion.site and custom domains, as well as where you can see a list of all the published pages in your Notion workspace.
On each Notion page/database, you can click on the Share menu at the top right corner to publish it. From there, you can select the domain associated with the public page, customize the site header, social media preview, dark/light mode, breadcrumb, favicon, search engine indexing, and add Google Analytics. For a full explanation and showcase of all the features, you can watch the dedicated video I recently published.
Find the Share menu at the top right corner of any Notion page
